Unlecture #2

The second ‘unlecture’ for the semester was like diving into the unknown once again. This was the first week of the ‘Q&A’ still forum, with all the tutors and Adrian fielding our various questions about the course.

It begun with Adrian asking us all to put away our laptops, and while I completely understand why this was done (who of us can honestly admit they’ve never spend a whole lecture browsing their various social media), I think it was slightly counter-intuitive to the subject as a whole, one that’s called Networked Media. I think the opportunity to do a ‘live blog’ of sorts for a lecture would be interesting, a stream-of-conscious style post on the things we immediately take out of the lecture, and hopefully we’ll be allowed to do this in the future.

The most important thing that was covered for me was the concept of liability with our blogs, and how even if someone else comments with something offensive or copyrighted, we can get in trouble for it. This unfortunately often leads to bloggers just blocking comments completely (and fair enough), although they can often lead to worthwhile discussion. This is something that is crucially important to us as we’re starting up our blogs, and think we all have a better idea of the issues surrounding it now.

I like the style of a ‘Q&A’ lecture, but I think it will be much more effective as we get further into the course, and semester. A lot of the questions were very basic and revolved around things we can easily find in the course guide, and I think some of these were written just for the sake of writing a question. But the concept of a forum-lecture is brilliant and will definitely be useful later on. When we’ve only got 50 minutes, I think it’d also be better to do away with questions written on paper, and as suggested in our tute, something like a live Twitter feed could be cool and effective.

So far, I’m finding it refreshing and interesting to be taught in this way, and I think it will only get better as we all get used to it and adapt to this different style.